Friday, 03 June, 2016

2016 Kavli Prize for Gerd Binnig

CeNS Advisory Board Member Gerd Binnig wins prestigious nanoscience award

 

From left to right: Gerd Binnig, Christoph Gerber, Calvin Quate

The 2016 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience is awarded to Gerd Binnig, Christoph Gerber, Calvin Quate for the invention and realization of atomic force microscopy, a breakthrough in measurement technology and nanosculpting that continues to have a transformative impact on nanoscience and technology.

Gerd Binnig is a German physicist and Nobel Laureate. Since 1999, Gerd Binnig has been member of CeNS' Scientific Advisory Board.
In collaboration with Heinrich Rohrer and other colleagues including Christoph Gerber and Edmund Weibel, in 1981 he developed the scanning tunnelling microscope. In recognition of this work, Binnig and Rohrer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Between 1985 and 1988, Binnig was based in California, working at IBM in Almaden and at Stanford University, where he had a visiting professorship. It was during this period that he involved his IBM colleague Christoph Gerber and Stanford Professor Calvin Quate in realizing his idea of the atomic force microscope. When he returned to Europe he was awarded an honorary professorship at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, where he directed an IBM laboratory until 1995. In 1994 he founded Definiens, a company dedicated to developing advanced processing tools for maximizing the information that can be gathered from images, with particular use for applications in medical diagnostics.
Aside from the Nobel Prize in Physics, Binnig’s work has been recognized with an IBM fellowship, as well as a number of other prizes including the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Prize and the King Faisal Prize.

The Kavli Prizes recognize scientists for pioneering advances in our understanding of existence at its biggest, smallest, and most complex scales. Presented every two years in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience, each of three international prizes consists of $1 million (U.S.). Laureates are chosen by committees whose members  are recommended by six of the world’s most renowned science societies and academies. The Kavli Prize is a partnership between The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Kavli Foundation (U.S.), and The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. It is named after Fred Kavli, a Norwegian-born U.S. philanthropist and founder of The Kavli Foundation.

Kavli prize homepage